Term of the Week: Non-repudiation

Why does a business professional need to know this?

Business professionals need to be able to verify that actions, such as bank transfers, contracts, and credit card purchases, can be linked with a specific actor (person or entity). Non-repudiation methods help ensure the following:

• The action was not taken by a hacker impersonating someone.
• The actor cannot claim to have not taken the action.

In today’s digital world, it is becoming increasingly important to verify that specific actions were taken by specific individuals. For transactions, such as financial transfers, that require greater integrity, organizations need to implement and enforce security measures that ensure the authenticity and intent of each transaction. For transactions, such as product surveys, where there is little or no business need to reliably identify a specific actor, it is less important to take such measures.

Measures to ensure non-repudiation include: notarization, multi-factor authentication, audit trails, digital signatures, and forensic analysis (e.g., handwriting analysis)(Spacey 2016).

There are multiple technologies available to implement and enforce non-repudiation. Measures to authenticate identity play an important part in ensuring that individuals are, in fact, who they assert themselves to be. Digital certificates and encryption can secure a message and ensure that its contents are not altered during transmission.

In an expanding digital economy, the integrity of your business depends on your ability to prove that each critical transaction was verifiably executed by a specific, identifiable person or process.